Bøker utgitt av W. W. Norton & Company

In this exuberant, transformative tale of modern-day Cairo, a drunken Irish journalist named Fin seeks a story. His friend Farouk, mercurial teller of tales, has tantalized him with news of the wily Skinhead Said, who may or may not have discovered a cache of priceless antiquities. But the truth remains elusive-not until they both travel to proverbial hell and back, courtesy of a thuggish kebab-shop tycoon and his brutal retinue. Once Fin finds a way to save his friend's life, and baba ghanoush is properly made, and other necessities of life are observed, then stories may be spun and secrets reluctantly revealed.

Meteorology is popularly associated with day-to-day forecasting of weather, but as Professor Sutcliffe shows, this is only one among many interests of the meteorologist.

Eve Spoke presents a compelling case for the pivotal role that speech has played in human language and human evolution. Wrestling with the age-old question of why such a large gulf exists between humans and other animals, Philip Lieberman mines both the fossil record and modern neuro-scientific techniques to chart the development of the anatomy and brain mechanisms necessary for human language as we know it. Eschewing any notion of a language gene or instinct, he pursues instead an evolutionary path in which environment acts on a biological capacity to reveal the interconnectedness of systems that make us most human: precise motor skills, speech, language, and complex thought. Lieberman interweaves decades of research in anthropology, neuroscience, psychology and linguistics into his exposition on the evolution of human speech.

The Macdonalds were both of their own time and yet our contemporaries. In the personal and social journeys they made they were creatures of an exceptional moment in history, a social drama set in a privileged time and place, while in the ordinary dynamics of their relationships with each other they were us. The dynamism of family life mirrored the times. From the birth of Alice soon after Queen Victoria came to the throne, to their dispersal at the end of a long Edwardian summer, the Macdonalds were a prime example of the fluidity and social mobility that characterized the age.

Girl Rearing is the story of girlhood in the fifties, the pent-up desire, the isolation by gender, the trials between mother and daughter. The last of four daughters, the narrator grows up in the wake of tragedy - her sister's death by drowning - and under the authority of her mother's ideas of proper cleanliness, posture, and feminine destiny. The narrator is destined to rebel. Never fulfilling expectations, she makes a doomed marriage and suffers a breakdown, but gradually her own voice emerges, one that has negotiated her mother's ideas of the feminine with her own rebellion. She must raise her own daughter and once again face the mysteries of her mother's feminine arts.

In the 1980s and 1990s, in places where no one thought it possible, scientists found organisms they called extremophiles: lovers of extremes. There were bacteria in volcanic hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, single-celled algae in Antarctic ice floes, and fungi in the cooling pools of nuclear reactors.But might there be life stranger than the most extreme extremophile? Might there be, somewhere, another kind of life entirely? In fact, scientists have hypothesized life that uses ammonia instead of water, life based not in carbon but in silicon, life driven by nuclear chemistry, and life whose very atoms are unlike those in life we know. In recent years some scientists have begun to look for the tamer versions of such life on rock surfaces in the American Southwest, in a "shadow biosphere" that might impinge on the known biosphere, and even deep within human tissue. They have also hypothesized more radical versions that might survive in Martian permafrost, in the cold ethylene lakes on Saturn's moon Titan, and in the hydrogen-rich atmospheres of giant planets in other solar systems. And they have imagined it in places off those worlds: the exotic ices in comets, the vast spaces between the stars, and-strangest of all-parallel universes.Distilling complex science in clear and lively prose, David Toomey illuminates the research of the biological avant-garde and describes the workings of weird organisms in riveting detail. His chapters feature an unforgettable cast of brilliant scientists and cover everything from problems with our definitions of life to the possibility of intelligent weird life. With wit and understanding that will delight scientists and lay readers alike, Toomey reveals how our current knowledge of life forms may account for only a tiny fraction of what's really out there.

The Study of Orchestration Workbook features a wide variety of exercises--many new to this edition--for any orchestration class and students of all skill levels. Test Yourself activities test factual information presented in the text, Worksheets offer opportunities to practice orchestrating short passages, and Listen and Score activities challenge students to identify and notate instrumentation aurally.

Set in the Nebraska landscape in a community evocative of Cather's own (Red Cloud), My Ántonia tells the story of Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant, and Jim Burden, who like Cather was uprooted from Virginia to the Nebraska prairie. Ántonia and Jim, like many of the other characters in this 1918 novel, are based on Cather's childhood friends. This Norton Critical Edition is based on the first published edition of the novel. It is accompanied by explanatory footnotes, key illustrations, an introduction that gives readers a historical overview of both author and novel, and a note on the text."Contexts and Backgrounds" is a rich collection of materials organized around the novel's central themes: "Autobiographical and Biographical Writings," "Letters," and "Americanization and Immigration." Willa Cather, Edith Lewis, Latrobe Carroll, Rose C. Feld, Guy Reynolds, Woodrow Wilson, Peter Roberts, Horace M. Kallen, Sarka B. Hrbkova, and Rose Rosicky, among others, are included."Criticism" spans a century of scholarship on Willa Cather and My Ántonia, from contemporary reviews by Henry Walcott Boynton, H. L. Mencken, and Elia W. Peattie, among others, to recent critical assessments by Terence Martin, Blanche Gelfant, Jean Schwind, Richard H. Millington, Susan Rosowski, Mike Fischer, Janis Stout, Marilee Lindemann, and Linda Joyce Brown.A Chronology of Cather's life and work and a Selected Bibliography are also included.

The residents of Haven, Wisconsin, have dined on the Fine Chao restaurant's delicious Americanized Chinese food for thirty-five years, content to ignore any unsavory whispers about the family owners. Whether or not Big Leo Chao is honest, or his wife, Winnie, is happy, their food tastes good and their three sons earned scholarships to respectable colleges. But when the brothers reunite in Haven, the Chao family's secrets and simmering resentments erupt at last.Before long, brash, charismatic, and tyrannical patriarch Leo is found dead-presumed murdered-and his sons find they've drawn the exacting gaze of the entire town. The ensuing trial brings to light potential motives for all three brothers: Dagou, the restaurant's reckless head chef; Ming, financially successful but personally tortured; and the youngest, gentle but lost college student James. As the spotlight on the brothers tightens-and the family dog meets an unexpected fate-Dagou, Ming, and James must reckon with the legacy of their father's outsized appetites and their own future survival.Brimming with heartbreak, comedy, and suspense, The Family Chao offers a kaleidoscopic, highly entertaining portrait of a Chinese American family grappling with the dark undercurrents of a seemingly pleasant small town.

In wanting to think through modern women's history, Susan Ware found herself drawn to seven larger-than-life women who influenced not only their professions-politics, journalism, anthropology, acting, sports, dance, and music-but also the way women saw themselves and their options in life. Ware recovers the people behind the legends of Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Thompson, Margaret Mead, Katharine Hepburn, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Martha Graham, and Marian Anderson in compelling life stories. She looks at how they created their persona, how they kept themselves in the public eye, and how they did so for so long. She also speaks to how these women balanced their personal lives-choosing lovers and mates and deciding whether to have children. In the choices they made and the success of those choices are lessons relevant to contemporary working women. As part of living exceptional and unconventional lives, they gave other women the ability to desire beyond the limits imposed on women and allowed them to dream and strive for lives of independence and fulfillment.

The Communist-oriented putsch developed on the night of September 30, 1965, when the Indonesian Communist Party-the oldest in Asia-had attained the zenith of its power and influence as the biggest Communist movement in the world after China and Russia. When Sukarno, the Communists, and a group of "progressive, revolutionary officer" struck, the Anglo-American allies were standing back to back on the rim of the South China Sea. In Vietnam, to the north, the Americans and their Asian allies were trying to hold the tide; in Malaysia, to the south, the British and their Pacific allies were trying to contain Sukarno. Both sought to blunt the Jakarta-Peking axis.

West of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies, stretching from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico, lie the nine states of level prairie and rolling high plains that constitute the very heart of the American continent. Here is the story of those states in our times, related by Neal Peirce as part of his sensitive account of people, politics, and power in the U.S.A. today.

With the harrowing power of Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden comes a remarkable work of fiction. Winner of the prestigious Premio La Nacion Prize for Fiction in 2000, A Secret for Julia brilliantly depicts the lasting psychological attacks of Argentina's reign of repression and terror on a new, seemingly innocent generation. Set mainly in 1990s London, interlaced with vivid flashbacks to Buenos Aires, Patricia Sagastizabal's novel tells the emotionally wrenching story of Mercedes Beecher, an Argentinian writer living in self-imposed exile in London with her teenaged daughter, Julia. When a mysterious figures appears from her past, Mercedes must endure a new round of psychological terror and reveal herself to her inquisitive but embittered, daughter in a way that she never believed possible. A dramatic story of retribution and conscience, A Secret for Julia touches on many compelling themes: the politics of institutionalized and sanctioned cruelty; the wistfulness of a life lived in exile; the bonds of family, justice, and redemption.Much of A Secret for Julia reads like a personal diary, yet Sagastizabal propels it forward with elements of astonishing intrigue, drama, and terror. The savage murders and tortures that came to decimate an entire generation of Argentinian students and activists in the 1970s may remain-even twenty-five years later-so vivid and searing that they can be expressed only through the palette of fiction. In this way, Sagastizabal's novel represents the voice of the fallout from Argentina's so-called "dirty war," the voice of the next generation-Julia's generation. A Secret for Julia is a testament to the changing of the guard-an unforgettable, astounding novel for one simple reason: the reader is left with the lingering notion that it might be frighteningly close to the truth.

An adjunct to "Ocean Planet", a major traveling exhibition opening at the Smithsonian Institution in 1995, this fascinating book is the first to explore the newest discoveries in oceanography and marine ecology in the context of the global economy and human population growth. For thousands of years humanity has seen the oceans as a mysterious, and limitless, source of treasures to be fished, harvested, mined, and salvaged. Now accelerating developments in ocean studies offer a new understanding of the oceans, their role in a global ecosystem, and their vulnerability to threats from human action. Drawing on the latest research, this book offers a fascinating tour of the complex reaches of our ocean world and points the way toward changes that will preserve, rather than squander, the wealth of oceans.

The facts are these: When Albert Einstein was a young man, his wife-to-be gave birth to a daughter, Lieserl, whom they soon gave up for adoption to a Hungarian woman. Beyond that, Lieserl Einstein is lost to history.But not to literature. Anna McGrail has imagined an amazing yet plausible life for this indomitable woman, one that spans the scientific history of the modern world from the theory of relativity to the atomic bomb and that moves from the plains of rural Hungary to the death camps of Germany to the laboratory at Los Alamos where the entire world was put under threat of annihilation. It is Lieserl's sole burning desire to learn physics, to beat her father at his own game, to teach him that his actions-whether giving away a daughter or unlocking the secrets of the universe-have consequences that cannot be denied. In that she will succeed-but at what cost to herself and to the world?An extraordinary tour de force of the literary imagination, written with utter confidence and panache. A novel certain to be widely reviewed, debated, and read. This breathtaking book will appeal to readers of works as diverse as Sophie's World and Jane Mendelssohn's I Was Amelia Earhart.

Long-distance father William McKeen watched his son grow up during summers, holidays, and long weekends. Now, with Graham in college, the two take a summer road trip down Highway 61, the legendary road of the blues, from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. In cheap motels and smoky bars, with obscure bluesmen and barnstorming guitar heroes, they discover how the highway links rich and poor, black and white. In Minnesota and Iowa, William shows his son where he spent boyhood summers with his father, who died a decade before Graham was born. In St. Louis, there's another nostalgic return to a former haunt, a slice of rock-and-roll heaven called Blueberry Hill. In Memphis, they find the genuine, uncommercialized side of the city's legendary music world, and deep in the heart of the Mississippi Delta they stand over the grave of legendary bluesman Charley Patton, listen to the murmur of wind over the cotton fields, and offer silent benediction. As they venture together through magnificent country, walking the hometown streets of Bob Dylan and Mark Twain, standing at Robert Johnson's haunted crossroads, journeying from the Delta Blues Museum to Doe's Eat Place to the Alachafaya Café of New Orleans, father and son come to realize that they have a permanent connection that can never be broken by age or distance."Rock authority, scholar, and newly minted good ol' boy when he feels like it, William McKeen doesn't even know how to be uninteresting, least of all on Highway 61." -Tom Wolfe "I read the book with joy and admiration for a writer at the top of his game. The book bursts with inspiration and cunningly chronicles the nuances of father/son relations in the broader context of a rock 'n' roll illusion. McKeen achieves a stunning narrative velocity and scope. A brilliant writer!" -Nick Fowler, author of A Thing (or Two) About Curtis and Camilla "All the senses are touched in this sassy but poignant road book. William McKeen's stick-to-the-ribs words will make readers hunger for greasy burgers, thirst for icy beer, and listen to a constant serenade of music and poetry from the shoulders of the highway. En route they eavesdrop on a father and son memorizing each other during their free-fall journey without any reservations." -Michael Wallis, author of Route 66: The Mother Road "From the Iron Range of Minnesota, where they search for the spirit of Bob Dylan, to the Mississippi Delta haunted by the ghost of Robert Johnson, William McKeen and his son take the reader down Highway 61 on a trip as rich as the musical roots they explore en route." -Curtis Wilkie, author of Dixie

Few writers of fiction have demonstrated so early in their career such a firm grasp of the forms disaster can take as Joseph Clark does in Jungle Wedding. Fewer still have been able to balance their unnerving feeling for apocalypse with an equally unerring sense of the possibilities for grace and transcendence, however provisional.In the title story a cutting-edge video artist is hired to document a shamanistic New Age wedding ceremony deep in the Central American jungle - and gets far more than he bargained for. In "Public Burning" a sociological experiment in the study and surveillance of an "average" American spirals down into a literally incendiary conclusion. "Wild Blue" is a tour de force narrative of one man's collision with the scarily dysfunctional American armed forces of the 1970s.Other stories in Jungle Wedding hold out possibilities for communion, reconciliation, and absolution. In "Revenge" emotional rescue for a psychologically besieged divorcée arrives in the form of a clearly too-young lust object, while "Oasis" stages a haunting father-daughter reunion in terrain reminiscent of a Sam Shepard play. Whatever his subject, Clark stakes out his territory with an imaginative authority and vigor of language that is truly exciting.